Run for Your life
by cliff.west
Summary: Intro. This is a Star Fleet Battles centered story about group of Neo-Tholians fleeing their home galaxy and trying to make to the Hold Fast.
1. Chapter 1

**Run for Your life**

**Chapter 1: The Fall**

Till"al sanuk looked at the display mounted at the front of the bridge of his great Heavy Dreadnought class warship. The display was showing the end of his people. It was not just showing the end of the empire he served. It was the end of his people. His great crystal head did not move, but a Tholian tear rolled down his face. He was not saying a word. He did not need to, but his mind was working. The mind of a high admiral should always be working. Only part of him was aware that the Lattice was almost grey with depression. It was coming from every member of his race within a few light years of where his ship currently rested.

_"How could this have happened_?" His optic sensors were drawn to the screen as another system was marked as falling. The Great Tholian Empire was falling to the slaves at a rate that should have been impossible.

The most trusted slaves had risen up and killed there masters, but they also were killing all of the other slave races that the Tholians had lorded over for centuries. The enemy had two massive advantages. One was the complete surprise of the attack, and the other were some of the weapons that had been used against the one-time slave masters.

Till had been able to fight off the first attack on his fleet. The Seltorians web cutters or breakers as some were now calling them, had come as a major surprise to him and his subordinate ship's Captains. It had made the mighty web casters rendered almost useless, when they were used according to doctrine the Tholian Navy had developed. The Tachyon phasers were still very useful in cutting into the hull of the hive ships.

The slave race had surprise on their side and he had lost half of that first fleet to them, even before he had found out about those web cutters. He had still "won" the battle. That is if you count that you have the only ships left in operation, when the shooting had stopped between the two groups. He had ordered a boarding party to try to recover examples of this new weapons technology. But that had only cost him the lives of his volunteers, as the slave overseers had blown themselves up instead of being captured.

He had tried to pull back to his support base as soon as he had consolidated what remained of his battle fleet, but it had already been attacked. He received the final report saying that it was about to be destroyed, before he was able to limp to it's aid. The same had been true of the next four bases that he had found over the next week.

On the day of the attack he had started with a fleet of 2 Heavy Dreadnaughts, 2 smaller Dreadnaughts, 6 Battleships, 18 Heavy Cruisers, two dozen Light Cruisers, and over 20 destroyer class ships. All of them crewed by pure Tholians. This did not count his support train and her escorts, which his fleet had been able to call on, before the attack.

After the first attack had been beaten off or survived. He only had 1 Heavy Dreadnaught, 2 Battleships, a Heavy Cruiser and one support ship that could support life when the firing had stopped. They had pulled what they could off the hulks. At first this had been rushed and many useful items had been left behind, because they did not know the magnitude of the conflict. As they found more and more wrecked hulks, Till started to understand how badly they might need some of those parts that had been left behind.

After that little realization had sunken in. He had ordered his remaining ships to spend more time at each of the battle sights they found. Soon their little fleet of damaged ships had started to slowly grow. Sometimes they could get a wreck back in some kind of operational status, and some crew would be shifted around to man them. In other times they would be found by the few other survivors of the surprise attacks. Never was it more than a pair of ships that found them. The enemy was being very thorough in hunting down the Tholian isolated survivors.

Sometimes the hobbled fleet was found by the uprising slaves. Without the element of surprise of the attack and the new "web cutters," Till had made the overconfident slaves pay for their insolence. The payback had not been all one way, and he had lost more people and ships to those renewed attacks. He had been able to claim that the enemy lost more ships and a larger amount of tonnage, but it would seem that the enemy had the ships and crews to lose.

It took him four months to find a support base, which had not been blasted into atoms. When he had made contact with the beleaguered fleet support base commander. Till did not know who was more relieved to find out someone else was alive. The base commander had been almost as relieved as Till had been at the news. It might only have been a battered and war damaged battle group. But it still was a Tholian battle group with its flagship intact. Till found out that the enemy had been targeting command ships in the opening rounds of battle. With the loss of Command and Control, the enemy had been able to roll up fleet after fleet around the galaxy.

Till tapped a side screen with a crystalline claw and new data was displayed. This one screen was not as detailed as he would have liked. It was just a textual report. By now most of the survivors were able to communicate via subspace to other groups Lattices. This had not been a good thing at first. It had allowed all of the groups to know, without a doubt, how badly that the Tholians were losing this war to the Seltorians Tribunal. Then, almost overnight, this had turned into a good thing for all of the surviving Tholians.

Each of the small groups, which were still able to defend themselves and or alive had been able to share data. One of the groups had hit upon the idea of using a wormhole generator to get around the blockade thrown up by the slaves/rebels of their outpost. This was not a new technology for the Tholians, but it was very tightly controlled by the Tholian central government. The central government that had been completely decapitated on the first days of the war.

With their own galaxy under supposed control. Some in the Tholian Empire had looked to other galaxies for expansion. The issue had been how to cross such grate voids between those massive groupings of stars. The idea also had been seen as a way to cut down on the travel time within this one galaxy. That had been the long and mid-range goals foreseen for this new technology. It had been used over the last twenty years, by the Capital District.

They had launched special surveying ships. Each one had been the size of three Magma class Dreadnoughts. They had only worked because they had given over everything within the hull to the new engine and labs. There was very little room for crew or for even weapons. Even then, the ships could only be use once. From what Till understood, each of the great ships had to be almost completely rebuilt from the hull out after it had returned from each mission. Even the high admirals had not been told everything about those missions. That did not mean, that some information had not leaked out. Only they were short on clear details.

Some of the dwindling survivors had latched onto this faint hope offered by this technology. Each of the little groups were slapping together their own wormhole generator out of whatever they could find at hand. The largest of the groups were not just going to send a test ship. They were going to try to send everyone and everything in those hold outs to a new location. Or at least that was what they hoped that they could do.

Till had asked the local base commander if this was an option for them. He had not been surprised to find out that this was not viable for them. This was just a small outpost, and that was probably the reason that it had survived the first few waves of the attack. There had been more important targets, which the enemy needed to take care of. So far it had been able to live on, only because of the slowly drying up stream of survivors. The small group of Tholian civilians did not have the skills or the equipment to make something on that scale, to shift a whole star and Dyson sphere. None of the other slave races had been allowed into this system and could not help with this project. Till had not been happy to send them to another system to wait for the war to end. He had a feeling that they would not live much longer after the Tholians had been killed off.

After the first few reports had come in about the wormhole generator. He was okay with this news. It was not the failures that were disturbing. It was the partial successes that were devastating. Some of the more arrogant or maybe just the more desperate had done the first test on a larger scale. If the wormhole failed? It was just a waist of energy and maybe some equipment, that would need to be replaced. A partial success would leave a sphere, at best, with a massive hole in the Dyson sphere's outer hull. A few of them had just been crushed into neutrons. He had seen the image transmitted back from a holdout system, which the whole Dyson's sphere had been crushed like it had been touched by one of the claws of the gods. The surviving fleet had launched an attack on the blockade soon after that test. Without support of the holdout base, the fleet was filled of crews just waiting to die in broken down ships. They had died, but the attacking Tholian ships had taken a huge bite out of the Seltorians fleets before they had died. The outer layer of remote defense sites and the few remaining ships would keep the rest of the onetime slaves from knowing that they were blockading a dead system.

Till had almost stopped reviewing those reports, after that one report. Then the nearest holdout system had sent and update. This one outpost had the luck of having a visiting small fleet from the Capital District close by, and it had contained a few very smart rocks. One of those smart rocks had worked out a way to use the power provided by the whole star system, and he came up with the idea of using two large ships of the fleet as a kind of sighting system. They were able to make and test, on small scale, a generator. The package had survived the ordeal and had made it to the newest and farthest galaxy any Tholian had ever recorded to have visited. The locals had called it the Milky Way. By now that one holdout group had launched three and recovered three recon packages. They were going to use this data, to find a "landing area". They sent this data and the thousands of pages of data on the move to make the next upscale test.

This one holdout had been sending updates to each of the other holdouts, as they succeeded or failed in each step or sub step of this project. It was hope that even if this group failed? They would generate more data that might help one of the other holdouts succeed in escaping from this galaxy. Till had no idea if this was helpful or not, but it did seem to keep a lot of the population focused on doing something other than dying. Till was getting the impression that the group was getting ready for the first major operational use of a wormhole device outside of the Central District.

Till was brought back to the actions of his body by a soft clicking sound coming from his Communication officer. Till tilted his sharp pointed head and lifted a crystal claw. "Yes, junior officer Fet'soal?"

Tholians did not have different sexes to propagate, but the lower ranked officer was due to divide or cleave soon, along with half his crew. The Tholians had made sure that each ship had a population that was ready to split for the last thousand years. Sometimes that had been a bad thing, when those splits were forced to have the new additions made into a lower skilled asset, all to make the numbers balanced within a ship. This junior officer was not low skilled. Till was expecting it to be a ships commander, soon. That was until the uprising of the slaves. Now who knew what the future might hold.

"Sir! Manager Fallal'ki is returning your com's request."

Till kept his optics focused on the younger officer for a few clicks more. "Thank you, junior officer. Please put it threw to my command saddle." Even as he was speaking. The green gem flickered for his attention. He pushed it with the tip of his right arm. "Manager. Thank you for returning my request. I trust you know why I sent it?"

The head of the local support fleet base gave a double click, which was like a human sigh. "Yes High Admiral. At least this time, I have good news. The repair workshop was able to take some of the data from the latest update. They refined it some, and then used almost a full cycle on the subspace transmitter to talk to that other holdout. They think they can use the data to make a smaller and shorter ranged wormhole generator. They think they might be able to use that larger transport and make what they have started to call a "Tactical Wormhole Generator." I think, that they think. That name makes it sound more threatening, somehow. I will send you the technical data as soon as they send it to me."

Till did a single long click and was thinking about what he had been told. He could hear something on the other person's clicks. It was the tone, and it did not sound good. Was he about to cool himself? They were losing a dozen souls a week to loss of hope. They had taken to cooling themselves, out of fits of depression. "Thank you Manager. I would like to see this data. Maybe we can use it to escape and make it to a larger holdout."

The Manager visibly changed colors as he processed what the senior military commander had said. "Yes! You are right. I will make sure you have the data as fast as they can get it together in something like understandable syntax."


	2. Chapter 2 the attack

I do not own this intellectual property, but it was eating me not to write it. I did not have a beta reader or a tech reviewer on this project. I also have not played the game for about 15 years.

**Chapter 2: The Attack**

Much to the surprise of the rest of the flagships staff. The data was promising, even the harder to understand version on the Lattice. It was promising enough that Till had made public an order for building the device. He could feel that the end was closing on them very quickly. They had not been attacked in almost 24 planetary rotations. If they would just hold off for a few more rotations? Then he would have one more battleship in his fleet. Between her, her sisters and the Dreadnought Facet. They would be a very nasty surprise to the enemy.

Not long after the order had been given to build the short ranged wormhole device. The nearest holdout had just tested, in full scale, the wormhole generator. It would be at least another planetary rotation before they could possibly know if it was successful or not. It would not matter. If a holdout was able to "leave" even if they were destroyed. The Seltorians would redouble their effort to wipeout the rest of the Tholians hold outs.

Till knew that his group only had been able to run a few tests on what was now officially called the TWG. So far it had not blown anyone apart. If it worked? Till was now thinking that those two surveying cruisers were going to be worth more than any dreadnought, instead of being a death trap in the battle line.

Half a rotation later. Till looked over at the data pad laying on his horse shoe shaped command desk. The test said that, if it worked. The projector would allow them to jump across a vast distance. The effective overall speed would be a hundred times warp 8.4. That was the fastest any ship in his overworked war fleet could maintain. He had made his staff pass the time by pre-plotting flight routes to all of the remaining Tholian holdouts. But deep down? He knew that even they would fall in time, and his people would end.

Just as the thought of cooling himself made its presence known to Till's mind. The pattern of green flashing lights told him that a priority message was waiting for him. If he had been on the bridge? He would have known what that message had said already. When he tapped the flashing green light, he was rewarded with the soft clicking of his communication's junior officer. It was a simple message that filled his cabin's hot atmosphere. "They made it."

Till did not say or do anything for a few seconds. His great crystal head tilted down just a little. He knew of about a dozen other groups of survivors that had left heading towards the same galaxy, which this hold out system had just successfully transferred itself to. Now it looked like those thrown together battle groups would have a place to land. That is, if they made the long trip through warp space. It made his life more complicated in some ways. Did he want to take the slow way or the fast way when he left this galaxy?

Till had been right about the enemy actions and plans. While his little hold out had been working at double speed to put a plan into action. One which very few had thought that they were ever going to have to undertake. While this was going on, the enemy showed back up. They were not going to let any of their pray escape. The disappearance of one of the holdouts massive home had shocked the Seltorians. The attack had always been planned, but the local Seltorian commander had been waiting for more reinforcements to finally take out this one hold out. Now they were just attacking with what they had, and an outdated operations plan.

Till was looking at the screens as they were updated by his hidden scout satellites. It was not complete data, but it was data that he could use. A slight smile colored the surface of Tills face, and he felt a warm tingle in his claw tips. This attack was going to be done in normal space and not at warp. This was going to play right into his power envelope.

Till looked over to a side screen, the Seltorians were coming hard. They had brought 6 capital ships and a full sized fleet of escorts. That was a lot of fire power, but they did not have surprise on their side this time, and they were attacking into prepared positions. Till had used all of the "free" time after the last round of attacks to place very strong web defenses around certain parts of this system. That was not going to be as helpful as it should, not with these enemy's having "Web Breakers", but they should help even the odds some.

Till picked out a pair of attacking capital ships almost at random. "Plot come to 56 by 89. Attack Plan 6k on C4 and C6. If any of the other ship leaders have an issue, tell them to contact me on my private channel."

Till did not receive any questions. The attacking enemy fleet quickly went to their well-practiced battle formation. The heavy ships were in the rear while a crescent of escorts took the lead. The small ships went to attack the energy webs, which had been set up to channel the enemy. While the small ships were working on that, the Tholian fleet came slashing in from one side. The heavy Web Casters and energy weapons lashed out in a massive wave of destruction, and soon two of the attacker's largest capital ships were rendered ineffective. Till had learned a thing or three after the first few attacks by the onetime slaves. The static webs had focused the attention of the enemy, just as Till had wanted them to in the opening phases of the battle.

He had made sure that all of the web casters in the whole fleet were used only on limited targets. It was not fair, but war is rarely fair. The heavy Tholian warships then fired their long-ranged T phasers. They ripped into the two surprised capital ships with ease. Then as the range fell, the heavy but shorter range particle cannons fired into them. As the Tholian fleet passed through the enemy fleet there were two hot gas balls, were the enemy capital ships had been.

They were not alone. While Till had been focused on those two massive battlewagons. The Seltorians had been returning the weapons fire into his ships. At first they had spread there fire over all of the attacking ships. That had not worked out well for the attacking enemy ships. Till had directed that shields, and speed were the primary focus. Just before the fleet started to pull away, the enemy drew blood. Four Tholian Heavy Cruisers were not with the Tholian fleet after the inter penetration of the two combatants.

Long range energy beams reached out from the rear of the rectangle shaped back ends of the Tholian ships. This time the subjects of their violence, were not the hostile capital ships. It reached out and touched the smaller craft that were the escorts. A single hit or at most two would drop the shields on the smaller war craft and a follow-on shot would cripple the target. Sometimes a follow-on shot would render the cripple ship dead in space. Or it would be dead in space until some charge on the inside of the ships would blow the lifeless wreck apart.

When Till's ships closed on the first echelon of enemy warships, that were attacking their way through layer after layer of energy web. Part two of the battle would play out. The closing speed was at full impulse and as fast as the slowest ship in what remained of the Tholian fleet. The heavy warships cut a path of destruction through the light cruisers, destroyers, and the smaller frigates that made up this part of the enemy fleet. Till's fleet was almost coasting threw the enemy fleet towards the end. When they passed the enemy the ships with aft mounted weapons would fire into any ship within range. They killed a dozen and a half of the three ship formations, before Till's fleet passed safely through the remaining blocking webs. When Till's now battered fleet cleared the far side of the web walls. They conducted a power turn and fell back into formation behind the remaining webs.

From this new position the now battle damaged Tholian fleet poured fire into the teeth of the attacking fleet. With only using enough power to keep from being a still target, the rest of the energy was put into weapons and shields. The Tholians used to almost excess, overloaded first their T-phasers, and then overloaded Particle cannon shots. Still the enemy closed on the defending fleet.

The key part of the plan of the attackers was the Tholian base. If the support base could be destroyed or even damaged enough? It would affect the ability of the defending fleet in the long run. Without a support base warships would not last long, even if they were not in battle. That fact would make it easier for the rest of the hive fleet to sweep up what remained of the Masters. The Seltorian flagship had been the third capital ship to be turned into a ball of hot expanding gases by the Tholians. Without any new orders. The enemy fleet kept up the attack on the blocking defense, even when they should have turned away. It was one of the longest space battles in recorded history by the Tholian fleet.

18 hours after the first weapons had been fired. Till was slumped on his saddle from exhaustion. He did not notice the working repair crew behind him. They were reinforcing one of the support beams over the bridge. It had been a near thing that the enemy weapons fire had not cracked the hull in this part of his ship. That was not the only damage done to his proud ship in the battle. He looked over to a side display at his much smaller fleet. His fleet was now short two of his massive dreadnoughts, four battleships and six heavy cruisers. In this battle very few smaller Tholian ships had been targeted by the enemy fleet.

Over the next four months there were only two other attacks on this group of Tholian hold outs. Till did not know why there was a delay, and each of those two attacks had been smaller than that last massive push by several orders of magnitude. As it turned out. The last enemy fleet commander had not been able to tell higher command about his failed attack. The Seltorian Higher command had other and larger fish to fry. They had assumed that his holdout was taken care of. The two weak attacks after the main push. They had been large scouting units sent by different sub fleet commanders into this local area. In short? Till and his charges had fallen through the cracks.

That time had been well used. First Till had rotated his worst damaged ships back to the starbase or to one of two open repair and yardships. The other two yard ships were supporting making components or modifying the largest freighter in the systems for their escape plan. As soon as all of the surviving warships were repaired and fully resupplied. The now free repair bays and slips went about supporting the rest of the gathered ships.

As soon as the yardships were done working on ships or helping build the device. They started working on the massive fleet starbase. First the yardships started attaching the only two super heavy tugs in the star system to the massive fleet base. The tugs were built on the hulls of older and smaller Dreadnaughts, and they were used only to move the most massive of cargos. Normal missions had those ships moving sections of Dyson spheres. When the attachment was done? The starbase and two ships were now more or less one larger ship.

The massive labs on the two surveying cruisers and the less advanced but more numerous Labs on the station were also hard at work. They were working on plotting a way out of here. Small craft were doing more sweeps of the local area for some of the harder to find raw materials, that the fleet would need. This was going to be a long trip, hopefully. Till and his staff had convinced the rest of the ship and base commanders that staying in this Galaxy was a losing proposition. They needed to follow the one sphere and the growing number of ships that were taking the long journey to that far away galaxy. That was the only way to survive the enemy.

Trill was dozing in his command chair, some days later. He had not been able to rest for any extended length of time sense the last "attack". The attack had "only" been made up of a single enemy destroy with 6 corvettes as close escorts. They had been blown out of space with little damage caused by this small group of attackers. But one of the smaller and faster enemy ships had escaped. They were out of time and Till knew it. He just did not know how long it would take, to get a large enemy fleet here to take care of them. As far as his staff could tell, there were only six hold out systems left. It took three repeats of the buzzing sounds. To get Till's head to pop up.

A set of clicks came from behind him. "Sir, the fleet has formed up. We can leave on your orders."

Till gave a slight shake, and he looked over to one side. He realized that he had been "sleeping" for almost four hours. There was not any time to "test" the device, which had been cobbled together as fast as they could. The whole fleet was in a line that started with the super large freighter and ended with the modified fleet support starbase. The whole fleet was made up of this ship A Heavy Dreadnaught, 2 Battleships, 4 Heavy Cruisers, 2 Heavy Surveying Cruisers, 6 Light Cruisers, 9 Frigates, 12 Destroyers of various types, 2 super heavy tugs (towing the armed fleet starbase), 2 heavy tugs with two cargo pods each, 5 light tugs with one pod each, 6 transports, 4 freighters, and 4 repair support ships or yardships, 12 patrol craft and the one large freighter. The last ship was tasked with solely carrying and supporting the wormhole generator. It was not much of a combat fleet, but it was every ship that was fully mission capable. Every ship that was not this way would be left behind, after it had been thoroughly stripped down of anything that might be useful.

Till sat taller in his saddle, and put his command face on. "Good! Contact the Flawed Stone. Have them spin up the device. We will be the first threw the wormhole. We will send a message back when we get to the other side."

Fifteen minutes later a ring of rotating blue and white rings of clouds floated in the black of space. The diamond tipped Tholian capital ship moved slowly, until it was surrounded by the ring of oddly colored clouds. In a few seconds the aft mounted sensors showed the clouds closing in behind them. The ship was only covered for a few seconds, before the sharp point of the heavy warship cleared the rotating blue and white ring clouds on the other end.

Till looked around at a few dozen displays spread out around his saddle. The readings said that they had just jumped all the way across the whole galaxy, all in less than a few seconds of travel. Till looked over to the Communication section, but before he could give the orders for the rest of the fleet to follow events unfolded that made these orders obsolete.

"Commander the Gleam has come through the wormhole!"

Till's great crystal head came up and he saw the great Battleship class ship come through the hole in space, and as he watched a Heavy Cruiser and a pair of light ones come through the rift in rapid secession. The fleet was quickly growing. Till was wondering what had happened that had caused such a massive change in his given orders.

"Sir! A message from the Gleam. They detected a slave Hive and a dozen Nest class ships that looked like they were closing into attack range. They are trying to make it here, before the enemy comes with in weapons range of the rest of the fleet."

Till looked over at the tactical seat. "Put us in position to fire into the event horizon. Do not wait for my orders. If an enemy ship comes through the rift? Fire everything you have, but only if an enemy ship pokes a claw threw that rift." Till watched as power was pulled from the engine and diverted into reinforcing his forward shield. The weapons had been charged before he had entered the wormhole just in case they ran into trouble. Now the non-warp engines were being tapped to provide any power needed to keep them at full power.

The long line of ships continued coming through the rip in space, until the massively modified and now mobile fleet starbase made it through the worm hole. The modified ship suddenly slewed to one side clearing the mouth of the wormhole like a drunk coming out of a bar. Then the last ship made an appearance like a magician. The large converted freighter had all manner of dishes and like looking devices of a dozen different types mounted on her outer hull. It also had a slowly growing number of labs. But there would be an upper limit to those labs. The main and two secondary cargo holds were filled with the wormhole generator, and the energy storage devices that the massive device needed to function.

As soon as the freighter cleared the blue and white swirls of clouds, the clouds went away as fast as the clouds had first formed. Due to the effects of the wormhole, Tills warship could not "see" the other side and its attacking enemies. Just as the Enemies could not see to the other side, and the small fleet that had escaped there attack.

The fleet broke down into their different tasks. The two surveying cruisers built on a large Heavy Cruiser hull, but without most of those heavy weapons that class had at one time, moved out under cover of an escorting group of warships. Each of the groups held a light cruiser and two destroyer class warships. They were able to move at a steady warp 7 after they formed into a new formation away from the rest of the fleet. They were to clear the area of any threats and to start mapping the next "jump". The General direction the scouts were traveling, was toward the energy barrier that marked the edge of this galaxy.

The rest of the fleet fell into a globe like formation. The light patrol craft made up the outer ring and then the heavier warships were closer in. The modified starbase and non-combat ships made up the very center of the globe. This fleet was following the two smaller scout groups at the maximum speed that the slowest craft could safely cruise at. That meant that the globe was "only" moving at Warp 4.3 or about 90 times the speed of light.

Every ship was at high alert. While they were on the move, they would not have the webs to help defend themselves against any attackers. It would take almost a week to recharge all of the energy cells for the wormhole device. During that week they were stuck in a "normal" traveling mode. The surveying ships would make it to the galaxy barrier days before the rest of the fleet. The Galactic Barrier had been an issue for the first few hundred years of the Tholian Empire. But now, if you knew how to adjust your shields in a certain way? Then it was not that big of a problem for the Empire. The two scout groups returned threw the barrier a full dozen hours, before the rest of the fleet made it to the agreed upon location.

After one more final check and a message sent via subspace to any remaining Tholian holdout. It was more of a goodbye and wishing them luck, than anything else message. The taskforce moved through the energy barrier, in a steady wave of metal. They would make their first jump within an hour of clearing the other side of the Galactic Energy Barrier. The hoped-for end point and other targeting data had been passed along to the large freighter from the two heavy scout ships and the labs carried by the now "mobile" base. The second jump was even more uneventful than the first full strength jump had been. Or more to the point, that was the way it seemed to the ships that had used the rift made by the wormhole generator.

The heavy scout cruiser Lava Flow found the remains of the battle first. The Tholian fleet had kept moving while the wormhole generator recharged. The scouts were looking for threats and anything that might be useful, as their labs worked to get the needed long ranged data. While the labs worked, the scouts sucked up any and all other data. It was this data that was first picked up by one of the outlying escort ships, and it had been passed along to the heavier scout ship. Then that raw data had drawn the whole scout task force to this location at high speed. It had turned out to be a tomb in the wastelands between the galaxies.

The area of space was nothing but floating wrecks and bits of "stuff" floating in a slowly growing cloud of wreckage. The scout commander sent one of the newly assigned Patrol Frigates and one of the Destroyers to go back to the rest of the fleet. If they were attacked, at least one of the ships should be able to get back to the main fleet. The key data was that they had found proof that this section of space was not safe for any passersby. While the messengers were on the way, the rest of the scouting unit would try to find out more about what had happened.

It took a full "day" or three shifts, for the slower ships in the main fleet to make it to this point in space. High Admiral Till"al sanuk looked out the main screen at the devastation that surrounded him. It was currently zoomed in on one section of the graveyard. The Seltorians only had three or four different main hull types along with about the same number of different secondary hulls. But they only had one Boom type they like to use. The different ship classes were made up of a combination of those few different pieces. One of the hulls he was looking at had three of those booms coming off a larger main hull. He blinked once as the diamond shaped forward hull of a Tholian heavy cruiser floated into his field of view between him and the wrecked enemy ship.

The vent over his head started pushing super-heated atmosphere into the bridge, and this brought him back to the world of the living. "Search every bit of the wreckage, see if we can find any survivors. I want the whole fleet on Alert in case anyone else comes by. I do not want to be caught with weapons cold and shields down."

After the first day of searching and a new attack did not happen. The orders to the fleet were changed. It went from a search mission, to one focused on recovery. It took a full seven orbital cycles between the change of mission and the final meeting, before the fleet started moving again. They would plan on traveling for two more days, before using the wormhole again to skip a head. This was just not necessary for the equipment, but it was needed for the wellbeing of the people living within the ship's hull. Traveling threw a wormhole was proving to be…distressing to the Tholians.

High Admiral Till"al sanuk looked around the room. One nice thing about having the meeting on the now mobile starbase. It had better and a lot larger briefing rooms to conduct physical meetings on this scale. At the other end of the room was Manager Fallal"ki. It was going to be up to the pair of them to manage this meeting today. There were three members from each of the ships in the fleet alone, with one specialist from each of the disciplines. When a chirp sounded across the room. The pre-planned meeting started.

The first briefer was one of the few scientist of any great skill in the fleet. "We have found out why the battle wreckage has spread out so far, and the reason for the state of any bodies we found on those ships. It also neatly ties into a data issue my people have been dealing with for some time now. This is the first stone of proof of what the raw data was trying to show us."

Till braced himself for the rest of the fleet to know what he had been briefed on just before this grave yard had been found. It had taken him and his staff sometime to come to grips with what they had been told. He had to have a private meeting with the scientist to find out why it had taken so long for him to be told of this "data" issue. It had been a one-way kind of meeting between the pair.

The scientist took a quick breath and the hot atmosphere slipped through his lips. "This data point was notice, but was not fully understood after the first test. It turns out that our wormhole is not just a short cut for distance. It also has a temporal part to our movement threw it. What seems like at most a few seconds to us? It is about 7 to 8 years for the rest of the universe. The reason that we did not find any living survivors on any of those wrecks? It is because this battle was over almost a decade ago."

Till gave the scientist a little tilt of his head from his side of the table. This was a sign that they had worked out, for him to stop talking. "Before you ask our hard-working scientist any more questions. The only way to fix something like this, is to break down the wormhole generator. Then they would have to find the issue, find a fix for the issue, and then rebuilt it. That is time that we do not have. We are in enemy controlled space. We will push on like we have been doing, unless a health risk is identified with this mode of travel. We will be doing a quick recovery of anything that might be useful from this area. There is a command section of a Heavy Cruiser that seems to be intact. I want it recovered and the Seltorian light cruiser we have seen. We already know that it is a dead ship, and the self-destruct systems did not work. I want to be able to have examples of these new weapons, when we get to a safe base at the end of our journey. I also want as many spare parts as we can get, because we have the space to store them. And we will not know how long it will take to get any production built back up. We will need that production, because as you all can see. The enemy is following our people, and killing them when they catch up to them."

As much as Till would have loved to have walked out of the meeting after he had given his orders. He could not. He had to let each group at least voice their opinion on this subject. He was the fleet commander. But if he wanted to remain in that job by the end of the day? He had to at least listen to each of them. As the military commander he did not take a vote, but by the end of the meeting everyone had agreed to his plan.

They would spend three more days in this area of space. All of the Tholian bodies were collected, and they were taken care of as directed by Tholian law. They were able to recover two command modules from the Tholian wrecks. One was almost in perfect condition, and the other one was repairable. They also found out why the enemy light cruiser had not blown up in their faces. The salvage crew found that the warship had taken catastrophic damage to its life support systems. The crew had died before the command to blow the warp core could be sent.

Whole warp and impulse engines were recovered from warships and transports alike. The teams did a hard and fast recovery, and those parts would need some attention before they could be reused. What was harder to find, was useable food supplies of any kind. They did recover many data storage devices, which might be filled with useful data. They all were recovered as they were found, not reviewed, just as they were found. When the last recovery and salvage team reported back to their ships. The wormhole generator was activated, and the little fleet left this part of space.

Till looked deep into the screen, and he thought that he felt some hot liquid flow down the cheeks of his hard-outer skin. This was the third battle field they had found on the trip, so far. The only good thing was that it was the first battle site, where they had only found enemy ships. More to the point all they found were wrecked enemy ships. They ranged in size from small destroyers going all the way up to one part of a wreck that alone was the size of a Tholian battle cruiser. He had plan to spend three days recovering anything useful, but he had called it off after only two days. They had not found anything useful in that time.

They still needed some time for the TWG to recharge, so Till had order the fleet to move out under normal warp drive. No sooner had they cleared the battle area, than one of the survey ships picked up an Ion trail. It was reading as a Tholian made Ion trail. Till postponed the powering up of the Wormhole generator after he had been told of this development. He let his fleet follow the trail until it was good and cold. He still waited three more days before he ordered the generator to be fired up. They needed to stay on that track. They would keep looking for any other Tholians now that they knew that they were out there, and that they were fighting the enemy.


	3. Chapter 3 They made it, but can we?

I do not own this intellectual property, but it was eating me not to write it. I did not have a beta reader or a tech reviewer on this project. I also have not played the game for about 15 years.

**Chapter 3: They made it, but can we?**

Sillfon tok' Mall looked at the screen with sad eyes. The screen was not that great, and it should have been replaced decades ago during this ship's last refit. His vessel was a warship, but she was only armed with pop guns. He was the deputy convoy commander. If anything happened to the armed escorts? He was in charge of the rest of the fleet. It was for the simple reason that his no named craft would be the only one left that was armed. The rest were just civilian ships packed to the deck heads with slowly starving refugees. On that screen he had just seen the last of the escorting warships die. He knew that it was only going to be a matter of time before they started killing "his" ships.

As he watched, the enemy pulled back to the edge of the battle area. Even with the escorts taking out almost 2 enemy ships for every one of the Tholian's. The enemy still had more warships, than was left in the whole rest of the refugee convoy. It they scattered? The enemy would still be able to send one warship or in some cases two warships after each of the Tholian ships. That was what plan Z was for. They would all die, and their ships would die with them. Each one did not have much in the way of weapons, but they had good shields and they had engines. All they needed to do, was live long enough to use them to take out at least one more enemy warship before they all died.

Sillfon was about to order a formation change that would put his unnamed fleet support ship at the point of the spear. He had picked out a medium sized vessel that should be an enemy heavy cruiser. The largest vessel had the most weapons and the most chance of taking out the rest of the fleet, before they could kill it. The enemy heavy cruiser was damaged, and that fact might give them a chance. At least for one of the remaining ships to reach it. Then the tactical display changed.

"Sir! We have ships dropping out of warp. They are ours!"

All Sillfon could do was watch as updated display codes started to cloud his screen. They just might live. That was the last thought Sillfon had as he fell back into his saddle. He was not going to have to make a death ride. Not with a Tholian Heavy Dreadnought out there, with escorts. He did not even think about where they might have come from after all of these years.

Till had been pushing his warship's engines as hard as he could. The labs on the mostly mobile starbase had picked up the fight between his people and the enemy, and Till had raced to the location. He had not left the fleet alone and almost undefended behind him. Besides some of the escorts, the fleet base had teeth of its own. He had recalled all of the units back to the main fleet location, while the heavy core of his fleet went to look for a fight.

As soon as his ships were out of warp. He gave orders to his fleet, he did not have time to make any detailed plans for this battle. He could not believe that he had found them in time. After finding all of those dead ships? He had now found some of his people, ones that he could help with his warships. "To the Fleet! Defend the civilians! Flag will target the Hive ship. Show them the same mercy they have shown our people."

Till took his flagship Dreadnought into the teeth of the enemy. Two of the light cruisers and four of the Frigates and Destroyers took up a line between the enemy and the battered fleet of civilian ships. One battleship and two of the heavy cruisers split off from the flag ship to thin out the enemy fleet. It was a gun fight in a phone booth. Till should have commanded the whole battle, but not this time. Every ship Captain had his own idea of what he wanted to do. All of the training that Till had manage to maintain, when swirling away.

Till was focused on the massive Hive class ship. He fired two of his web casters, and smiled. The enemy would be a little surprised by these weapons. They had been looking at the web breaker on the captured ship for some time. They could not completely counter it, but it would be harder for the enemy to counter this slightly upgraded weapon. Still Till was not using them as Tholian Doctrine said they should.

The massive Hive Class ship was hit with both webs. This stunning attack was followed up by heavy hits from T-phasers and plasma torpedoes. The harder hitting, but shorter range and power intensive Particle cannons were held until the range was shorter. The powerful dreadnought took hits from the larger ship. But for every hit the enemy succeeded in getting on the Tholian flagship. The flagship hit the Hive ship four times.

Till was attacking right into the teeth of the enemy ship. The enemy ship had been counting on its web breakers and second-generation shield crushers to strip the Tholian warship of most of its defenses. By the time the enemy commander had realized that this was not going to work. Till had power turned and was behind the Hive ship. Till started pumping all the firepower he could into the weak aft of the massive enemy warship. The only good thing was that with only one ship firing at the Hive ship. They could fire all her aft mounted weapons and reinforce the aft shields, and not have to worry about putting power to the forward weapons and shield generators. It was a case of simple power management. That is until the Tholian weapons fire damaged any of the power supplying systems on the enemy ship.

With the Seltorian flagship under heavy pressure and removed from the larger fight. The other Tholian capital ships rolled up the enemy battle line made up of smaller warships. The Tholian capital ships used there modified ships to good effect, and they went into knife fighting range of the enemy ships. The larger ships would only take one or two enemy ships under fire at a time. The smaller ships were taken out of the battle after only a volley or two. When each enemy ship was made combat ineffective, the Tholians would move to the next nearest enemy warship.

When the last Seltorian small warship fell to the Tholians fire. The enemy flagship fled the battle field. Till was angry when the enemy flagship fled. He was tempted to continue the attack, but he had all of those unarmed ships, and they could not be left on their own.

Till looked over at his communications officer. "Please contact whoever is in charge over there, and see what we can do to help." He had a staff that could handle things for now. He needed to think about the future.

While the two fleets rushed to find any Tholians in distress on battle damaged ships. The Flagship kept an eye on the whole mess of a battle field. Till was weak in the legs. The battle energy was leaving him, and his body was tired. He took some time to pull up the military files updated with the sensors on his warship, on the enemy ship, that they had been fighting in this battle. Till was lost in thought, as he reviewed the known and suspected capabilities of the Hive class ship. Till's diamond shaped eyes narrowed and with a few quick movements he was beside the large communications officer.

"Contact each of our ships. Destroy all enemy warships." The tone was flat and deadly.

The Tholian officer was made of stern stuff. "You do not want to try to salvage any of them?" That had been the standing orders for some time now.

"No. We do not have the time, and that Flagship is supposed to have the ability to repair, rebuilt or just build new escort craft. All they need is wreck hulks to start with or other raw materials. I will not see these hulks put back into service and used against other groups of our people."

The communication officer did a slight nod of its pointed head and the orders flew out of her station. It did not take long before powerful weapons reached out to each of the remaining enemy hulks. The powerful energy strikes mainly came from the now less used Particle cannons. They used a lot of power and were deadly weapons. Now they were being put to use on the unshielded hull and large ship fragments.

The shuttle carried Sillfon to Till's flagship. He was to get a briefing on what the rescue warships had been doing. He had already read two pre briefing files. He was having a hard time believing that they had a time issue with the wormhole generator. He knew something about those types of generators. He could not build one, but he knew how the theory of them worked. The main reason for this meeting was to let the admiral know if his "fleet" would follow the warship back to the central area, and then use this device to finish the trip to a new home.

Sillfon was amazed at how clean and fresh the corridors of the flagship looked. He was quickly escorted to the bridge. He was only a senior captain of a support ship, but he was being treated as a fellow senior officer by the crew of this warship. The meeting with Till went about as could be expected. He did not seem surprised that Sillfon brought word that every ship "under his command" was going to follow the war fleet and the high admiral's orders. The little meeting was about to break up. Both officers had a lot to do.

"Ship inbound… Warp 2.2 187 x negative 45." This was called out by the tactical station. After a few more seconds more information was gleaned from the sensors. "It is small, but she has our energy signature. She is an Empire warship."

Till looked at Sillfon and gave him a level look. "I thought you said, that all of your escorts were destroyed over the last six solar orbits."

Sillfon had turned over all of his records. It was to help mark each ship that they had, when they left the home galaxy and were they had died. Tholians took death of other Tholians very seriously. And not knowing when one of their ships died, was a stain on your soul. "They did die. I do not know who this might be."

Till took in every click of sound from Sillfon. He believed the haggard senior captain. "Bring the fleet to alert, but have them hold fire. Let see who our new foundling might be."

The two men watched on the screen as a ship dropped out of warp. A ship should not age in deep space. There was nothing to rust or discolor a ship's hull. That is unless they had seen combat or been too close to things that could bring a hull to a high heat point. That was a lot of heat, because the Tholian race loved heat. But this ship had seen action, and she also looked to be on her last legs as she came out of faster than light speed.

Till and Sillfon could read the data on the screens. Sillfon looked up first of the pair. "She is a Destroyer Escort? I did not know we made many of those. I thought our Frigates did those types of jobs just fine, and high command canceled the program."

Till nodded his faceted and pointed head. "You are right, but she is a little larger than your average frigate, has more weapons, better shields, and their range is longer than all of our other frigates. Still she is a long way from home, to be all alone. Look at the output on her port engine. I bet that she had to push it hard just to make it the 2.2 we clocked her at. She still looks like she is about to blow apart.

The fleet along with its newest warship left the battle sight not long after the Destroyer Escort had joined them. Her speed was limited to only warp 2. Till was not going to leave anyone, much less a warship behind. He also did not want to risk her and ordered a little more reserved warp 2 for speed. He just ordered a course change, and a new meeting spot for the rest of the fleet in the deep of space. After they got there, the small warship could be pulled into a repair bay. More than likely Till was going to have her dock inside the mobile starbase. There she would not slow the rest of the fleet, and she would be safe. That was something that the little ship and her crew had not had in a long time.

Till was thinking about the report, that he had been given by the third officer. The young one was the senior officer, and had been in command of that wreck of a ship for four years. They had left the home galaxy with 6 other warships and some assorted transports not long after Till had left. His final message had been the needed push to get them to leave. They had been hunted and their numbers cut down, until she was alone. She had "lucked out" and found a new convoy not long after, but this convoy had been attacked also. This time the Lucky ship had lost her commander. When that convoy had been ordered to scatter. The little warship had been alone again. She had been chasing ghost for two years when they found a new home. This new home had lasted for a little over a year before they were attacked, and they were again forced to scatter. That last attack had taken the second officer leaving the youngling in charge of a damage and leaderless ship. That had been over four years ago.

She had picked up the distress calls and had come running to the sound of weapons fire as fast has her abused engines could push her. It was very brave and Till made a note to see where he could move the key leadership of that ship. He did not know when or how, but he knew that he or his people were going to need leaders like that in the future.

It would take three planetary rotations to make it to the new jump point. The rest of the fleet was waiting for the warships and the new additions to the group. Till did not wait long. He just waited long enough to get an update from the rest of the ships. He wanted to make sure nothing important had happened while he was away. When those reports were done, and the small warship had already been pulled inside the massive starbase. He did not wait to get the report that she had been fixed, so that it would be safe from most action in the outside world. That is outside of a major hull breach. It was time to leave this area of now proven hostile space.

Then Till order the wormhole generator fired up and he started to pass ships threw the rip in space/time. He sent half of his warships first threw the rip in space/time first. Then he sent the new additions, just to make sure that they did not balk at the last minute. After the last "new" ship had passed the cloud like boundary. The rest of the civilian ships made the trip into the ring of clouds. The last ship to go through the rip in space, was the flagship. She waited until the unstable rip was about to close. Till did not want anyone to follow them that might cause trouble. He made sure that there was nothing on the long-range sensors, before ordering his ship to advance at half impulse. Only after the rip had closed, did he breathe any easier. He had two recurring nightmares. One was that an enemy fleet would follow them threw one of these rips. And the other was that the rip would be seen by their people, but it would close before they could make it threw to join his fleet.

It did not take long for the fleet to shake out, and the detachments to start to head out to look for threats, gather data, charge the energy hungry beast that was the wormhole generator, and make any needed repairs. This was when the rest of the non-warships could send teams over to help the dozen new ships in the fleet. Stories would start to flow and soon Till's fleet would not feel like they were hard pressed in fleeing the enemy. This group had stories that could freeze the two Tholian's hearts between beats. This did have an effect of cracking the shell of most of the civilians into working harder to keep the fleet alive and moving. If this one small group could make it this far, then why couldn't they make it all the way to a new home?

The Seltorian Admiral was angry, but all he could do was hold his jaw full of sharp dinosaur like teeth closed. He had been in command of the massive hive ship. They had been sent out to hunt down the fleeing Old Masters and destroy them all, and any helpers that might still be with them. He knew that there had been at least three other Hive ships and a few dozen Nest class ships sent on this mission. He knew that two of the Hives ships and six of the Nest class and their escorts had been destroyed, or they had been forced to turn back due to damage. He had lost 2 battle cruisers, 6 heavy cruisers, and a dozen smaller ships in this one battle alone. That did not count what had been lost over the last many years of battle. He had left the home galaxy with a bountiful fleet. Then he had been able to add to it thanks to the birthing tanks on his hive ship and construction bays. Now it was all gone. It would take many months to rebuild the next and first escort for his great ship. Without those smaller ships, it would cut down the area he could cover looking for the Old Masters.

He had been forced to run from the battle by the Old Masters. This was the first time for him to fight against a Master Battle Fleet. He had read reports before he had left the home galaxy, but this was totally different. They had fought like his people, and not the lazy slave masters he had read about. He had pulled back his ship, until he was sure he was not detected by the master's any longer, and then waited to see if they had followed. After a half day waiting in space, with his shields and weapons powered up and doing some hasty repairs of his great ship. He had ordered his command to return to the site of the last battle, as stealthily as they could. He had chosen stealth over speed.

He did not want to take on what his sensors said was a short Master battle group, alone. Not with just his single damaged Hive ship. He had first wanted to collect any recoverable ships from the last battle site. As long as there were wrecked ships to find, he could have them quickly rebuilt and returned to service. As he looked on the wrap around screen. He did not find one ship or hull part large enough for his ships sensitive scanners to pick up. This was a first. They had been able to find or recover many major ship parts on the trip following the Ex-Masters. Most of the time they were able to recover a mix of Seltorian and Master ships. This was a change, and he did not like it. It seemed like the Ex-Masters had learned a new trick. And it was one aimed right at the support base of his people, and their bid to rid the universe of the Tholians. All he could do was find the nearest source of raw material and spend the next few weeks mining. Then he could try to find more of the Masters, as his crew worked on hatching new crewmembers and making new escort ships. He was just hoping that he would not find a group too large for him to kill with his now less capable command.

Till's first scout task force found the enemy not long before they were to make the next wormhole jump. Now that his ships had another taste of battle, and the crews had seen what hardships the refugee fleet had endured. Then the Lattice had been flooded with the stories from the almost wrecked escort. Till's fleet was almost actively looking for another battle with the enemy. They were no longer fleeing the enemy. They were redeploying to a new battle front. Any Seltorian ship that was found was a potential target, and one that needed to be blown out of space.

The scouting taskforce did not report back to the flagship right away. They used the scout cruiser's impressive Labs to get a read on the enemy fleet. It did not take long for it to work out that it was a Seltorian supply and support convoy. It was made up of four Destroyers, one Light Cruiser that was the flagship, and ten ships that were a mix of different types of support and supply ships. It was a very tempting target for a small Tholian taskforce that was looking for a fight.

The attacking Tholians taskforce commander wanted to find out what was on those support ships. To do that? The scout cruiser had to scan each ship, before it was blasted into dust and other cosmic debris. That was where good planning was going to come in. Just enough Tholian ships attacked, in light warships, to pull off the convoy's escort. With the escorts gone, the needed information would have a better chance of being collected.

It had taken the act of three smaller Tholian ships ganging up and destroying one of the escorting destroyer class ships, before the enemy escort commander took the bait and chased off after the smaller ships. The scout cruiser came up from behind the now smaller and almost defenseless fleet. She was only able to look at four of the enemy freighters, before they started to scatter. They should have scattered before then, but their fleet had been the ones attacking the Ex-Masters fleeing ships for too long. The onetime slaves were not used to being the ones who were attacked by enemy warships. To have an effective scatter plan, you had to first think that you would need it. Only two more support ships would be scanned before they were all blown out of space by the attacking Tholian warships.

When the escorts returned to the convoy, after receiving broken cries for help that were able to make it through the jamming of the larger warship. They found only hot dust, and a trap. The light cruiser was almost as powerful as the heavy survey ship. It could not match her and her four escorts. While the enemy light cruiser was fighting for its life. The rest of the scout task force came in from behind and systematically wiped out the few remaining smaller escorts. With all of the data in hand the Tholian task force returned to the fleet flagship.

Till was not happy with his scout task force commander. The role of a scout was to scout, and not take on an enemy fleet. The only thing that had convinced Till not to relieve the taskforce commander was the data he had been able to recover. It had taken two days for the scout fleet to make it back to the flagship, and the ships she protected. In that time the Labs on the scout cruiser were able to work on the collected data without interruption.

Till was looking at the data. They only had data on half of the enemy convoy, but that was enough data for Till and his staff to work out what the mission this convoy was supporting. It had been full of weapons, engines, and food. You would expect those items in a fleet support convoy. But in over half of the cargo areas scanned, were items that the starbase databases confirmed to be items needed for the enemy to generate new and replacement crewmembers. With the removal of that one convoy? It should make a major impact on the support of any other capital units that were out there hunting any more of his fleeing people. That was almost the very definition of a high value target.

Till had a lot to think about as his fleet slowly moved toward its next meeting point. He was having trouble thinking straight or even following his own plans. The new additions to this fleets "Lattice" was causing a major shift in how the whole group was thinking. Those few ships had also added to the distress and crowding of the fleet under his command. All of the new ships needed time in the repair bays on the yard ships or starbase. This caused a major drain on their stored supplies to maintain his overall fleet.

All of those new beings also tasked the food storage of his fleet. Each ship could only pump out some many nutrients into the atmosphere in a given amount of living space. Those ships had been overcrowded from the start and they were still so after so many of them had died for one reason or another. Now those new beings were being moved into ships that he had started with. It would take some time to modify the ships to handle the additional population safely. They could work threw it, but it would take time and resources. Till was just thankful that they did not have to worry about any young ones.

One change that the Fleet commander put out was that the scout fleet would be smaller for now, with only a pair of escorts per scout. The rest of the warships would fan out in small groups, and they would be actively looking for the enemy. They were to find, but not be seen. The whole fleet would only be delayed for no more than two days from the posted schedule of inter galactic jumps. In that time between jumps, any enemy ship would be burned from space. He made sure to point out that any recovered enemy ship could be repaired and reused against their people. They were to leave nothing for the enemy to use in the wake of his fleet.

Escort Squadron 4 was made up of one Light Cruiser, four Destroyers, and eight diamond shaped police and customs patrol type craft. It was a powerful force, but not that powerful. It's mission was to head back towards the home galaxy for a certain distance behind the core of Till's fleet. The term was, clearing your back trail. It was to see if they could find any enemy ships that the wormhole let them "jump" over. If they found any that the squadron commander thought they could takeout? They were to do so. If the enemy was to powerful? They were to contact the flagship via subspace and wait for more ships to come to them.

After the squadron was reinforced, they could attack the enemy ships. They and the other escort squadrons were also looking to find any other survivors. Rumor in the Lattice and subspace had pick up something about a unit called 312 Battle Squadron. No one knew if it was wishful thinking or not. But it seemed that other Tholians had successfully made it this far from home. Till wanted to gather as large of a fleet as he could, and it did not just have to be warships. He wanted every space worthy Tholian ship he could find.

Escort Squadron 4 had just made the turn, to bring it back on a course to return them to the flagship. That was when the destroyer on the outer edge of the formation picked up a ghost on their scanners. It took only a few seconds to find out that it was not a ghost, but a convoy of ships moving on a parallel course as the escorts were now heading. With just a slight change in course, the Tholian ships had picked up on them. It was determent that it was an enemy convoy. It only had an escort of three Destroyer class ships and one unknown type of frigate. The center was made up of six medium cargo ships. It was noted that some of these ships were not known to be used by the enemy, but by other races from the home galaxy. That was very puzzling for the squadron commander. All of this information was sent back to the flagship, and the squadron waited.

The newly reinforced Tholian attack force formed into a line and came sweeping on to the flanks of the convoy. This time they were not looking for information. They were looking to reap death and destruction. That was when the Tholian attackers were surprised. There were not four escorts for this convoy. There were five warships. A light cruiser had been on the other side of the fleet, hidden by the bulk of a larger cargo ship. The first round of firing had the web casters firing to block the enemy ships from escaping. Then they were fired so that it would start channeling the enemy convoy into the guns of the attacking Tholians or move them into a line of retreat that would let the warships catch them more easily. When the larger Seltorian warship came charging over the top of the panicked convoy? It ran into a wave of web casters fired in Web Fist mode.

The following additional round of web caster firing put up a barrier between the attacking but damaged enemy warships. These blocking webs soaked up some of the incoming fire, until the attacking ships could get their web breakers charged up. But the Seltorian would have to live long enough to use them, and all it did was take energy away from the shield generators. With the barrier in place the Tholian warships fired their T-phasers and torpedoes. Soon the Seltorian warships were on the defensive.

The battle was now well in hand. The outnumbered enemy warships were being pounded by the Tholians ships. The enemy warships were so worried about living, that they did not notice the small PC start to pull out of the battle. 6 of the 8 small craft made one more firing pass on the warships, and then they broke off. The other two patrol craft pulled out of the main battle, but they were still providing fire support to any of the Tholian warships. The six small but fast warships started tracking down the fleeing but slower transports. Soon the fleeing ships were shot out of warp and were crippled in normal space. As per their orders, the small craft fired into the engines of the cargo ships with their T-phasers and particle cannons. Warp cores, no matter how undamaged do not like to have interactions with tachyons and heavy particle weapons.

Before the last of the fleeing cargo ships were hunted down, the small enemy frigate lost its engines and main power to its weapons. After one more final strike on the powerless and motionless ship, it was over. The Tholian Destroyer shifted its firepower onto the nearest enemy ship. That was one of the enemy destroyers that was holding off its attacker. Soon the two Tholian warships had defeated the sole enemy ship. With two ships now free from battle. They formed a firing unit and the two warships added their combined firepower to shoot down the second enemy destroyer.

The application of so much firepower coming from a surprising direction. The firepower hammered threw power starved shield generators and into the heart of the warship. The third and last Destroyer was shot down before the rest of the Tholians ships of a like class could bring their firepower to bare. The last convoy escort to fall was the heaviest one. The enemy ship was new, but her captain and crew were well trained and combat experienced. If this had been a fare fight? She might have taken out the Tholian cruiser. But this had not been a fare fight, it was war.


	4. Chapter 4 The edge of Galactic barrier

I do not own this intellectual property, but it was eating me not to write it. I did not have a beta reader or a tech reviewer on this project. I also have not played the game for about 15 years.

**Chapter 4: The edge of Galactic barrier.**

It had been a little over six months after the second enemy convoy had been wiped out, that Till could look at the great energy barrier that separated this galaxy from the rest of the universe. Even with massive computer support, there was no way to tell how much time had passed in the regular universe. To Till it had been a little over three Tholian years since they had made the jump through the energy barrier of their home galaxy. Every jump they made, they would sweep the area clean of any enemy ships and look for their own kind. They had found plenty of enemy ships, and none of their kind left alive. The route between these two galaxies was not littered, but it was sprinkled with dead Tholian and enemy ships.

Till was stuck. Now that they were here, they had to work out how to get into the new Galaxy. Each Galaxy had its own type of energy barrier covering it on all sides. About all the Tholians knew was that they worked on a totally different set of frequencies. The Tholian government, Command Group, and High Scientist knew the code for this galaxy, but none of them were with this fleet. They were starting to run short of food. If they did not find a Y class planet on the other side of this barrier. It was going to start affecting the health of his more at risk population.

This was another time when those survey cruisers were proving their cost of building had been money well spent. They were moving about one day out from the main fleet, with a dedicated heavy escort. They were working on finding what "the code" was to this energy barrier might be. Maybe in another week, they would have it. Then they would have to feed this data to the wormhole generator. Only six ships in this fleet had the right equipment to use that code safely, and there was no way to know were in this galaxy their people might be hiding. Till had to fight to keep focused on only this problem. He could not afford to let his mind get tangled in all of the problems building in the fleet.

Three weeks later Till was in the number one cargo hold of the largest cargo ship under his command. It was the largest open space in the whole fleet. Even the mobile starbase did not have a single open area this large. At least it would have been large, if it was not totally filled with the equipment that the tactical wormhole generator needed to function. The room did not look….good. It looked like it had been hit with heavy enemy weapons fire to the untrained eye.

Till looked over to the head scientist. He looked almost as bad as this cargo hold. It did not help that he was overdue for splitting before the uprising. Soon he might have to surrender his life and undergo the splitting anyway. Till was not sure that was a good idea, and the fleet doctors were of 6 minds on the subject. If they could only find a planet to resupply, then that would be helpful on one of the things that looked to be a quickly growing issue.

"How long until it can be repaired?"

The scientist's head fell low and his six legs folded a little in distress. "Maybe if we had a few months and a star system to draw the right raw materials from. We will have to build a new one from scratch. We might be able to recycle half of the generator, but that is only a guess. If we have to rebuild half? It would just be easier and maybe quicker to take it all down and build a new one from the deck plates out."

Till folded his legs just enough to lower himself to look into the white slits on the scientist's face. He knew that he had no right to think badly about the being. He had made this device even though that something like this was not in his line of training. He had held the device together since day one. "What happened?"

The scientist came out of the submissive posture. "We might have pushed it too hard and for too long, before thinking about overhauling it. We had no idea how long something like this should work, before a mean breakdown cycle time caught up to us. Between that and maybe too raw or under refined numbers on the galactic barrier code. It was too much, and it burned out. At least it worked long enough to get us through the barrier before it froze on us."

"That it did. But now we are going to have to use the old fashion way of trying to find out where our people are. Please pass along what you need to your supply person. We will see what we can find or do to help you rebuild or replace it. A galaxy is a large place to hide in."

Till returned to his flagship and spent the next three days working with his staff. They went over all of the facts, as they knew them. They knew that they had people in this galaxy. They knew that the holdouts had been targeting a landing area on the edge of the galaxy. That left them with two ways to travel and not three, which a worst-case scenario would have given them.

They could go spinward or anti spinward, that was it. They did not need to go to the two galactic poles, due to few planets being outside the "arms" of the galaxy. It was a coin toss and Till had to choose one direction to travel. He ordered his scouts to form a line of advance. The one edge would be just far enough from the energy barrier to pick it up, and then the line of ships would move perpendicular to the energy barrier. The long-range systems on the scout cruisers would let that line start almost twice as far, if he would have anchored the line with one of his main warships. The other scout cruiser would be on the other end of the line. Till was hoping that she would be able to reach far enough into the galaxy to find any deeply buried clues.

Till looked over to his navigator. "Is the course set, and the assignments passed to every ship?" Till was still thinking that he should add the civilian ships into his line, so that he could extend his sweeping line a little more.

The more purple than red outer shell navigator did not turn to face the fleet commander. He just gave a reply to the question. "Yes sir."

Till did a little head bob. "Then we should go. Order Warp 3.5 for the core group and let the scouts off of their tethers. It's time to find our people!"

Ships, in small groups, went to warp as they took to their missions. The last group was the most important to the Tholian race. They also were the least able to defend themselves, and even while moving at many times the speed of light. Till was on the clock. What would run out first? Would his ships start to break down first, or would they run out of food. Right now, it looked like food was going to be the next major issue that he was going to have to deal with. Before he left for his cabin, he made sure that this staff was also looking at finding a place that might have food and other materials that his little fleet might need now or in the future.


	5. Chapter 5 Orion vs Neo-Tholians

I do not own this intellectual property, but it was eating me not to write it. I did not have a beta reader or a tech reviewer on this project. I also have not played the game for about 15 years.

**Chapter 5: Orion vs Neo-Tholians**.

The Captain of the Orion cargo ship Good Trade looks at the Neo Tholian fleet with dread. He had been looking for new markets for the last few cycles. He had lost his blockade runner to damage from a less than successful run in the Triangle. While he waited for his main ship to be repaired. His cartel boss had ordered him to look for new markets to help pay for the damage, that he had let happen to his command. This system should have been empty of any life. Its primary planet was almost a class Y, of all things. If he had been closer to the Tholian Holdfast area, he would have been more careful. They were known to like these rare planets or systems without any normal life supporting sized planets.

Now he was looking at a dreadnought class warship which belonged to a well-known violent xenophobic race, and all he had was this lightly armored freighter/scout. He did remember one thing. It was that the Holdfast had been less violent with the ISC and Andromedan running around. Still even then a cargo ship, even an armed one like Orion's like to make. You did not like bumping into a dreadnought of any kind. The only good thing, for the measure of good. It was that they were not firing into his ship, yet.

Till was looking at his screen and waiting. The alien ship had come out of warp at the edge of the star system. It was bad timing, near as they could tell the alien ship had come up from "behind" the fleet. This had been the first star system to collect the items that the fleet needed, so that the beings could eat. They only had been able to collect a few tons of the vital substances, before the alarm had been sounded threw out the fleet.

They had been lucky, and it was only one ship. The Alien ship had not advanced after it had detected his ship. It had been the flagships turn on the outer ring of firepower and to be on alert. He had taken his ship out to meet this alien. He wanted this to happen as far from the rest of the fleet as he could. They had been in this galaxy for over six months, and this was the first contact with any alien race. A few ships had been picked up on the edge of sensors, but they had moved away or Till had order the fleet to go quiet while the craft cleared the area.

The Orion Captain was sweating as neither side moved. He had a feeling that if something did not change soon. It would only change badly. "Comms. Hook in the translator. Let's see what they are doing out here." He did not want to say. Let us try to talk to them before they blow us out of space, because someone sneezed on the bridge.

The Flagship had just sent a message to the rest of the fleet. It was simple and to the point. No threat yet, and all ships to remain in hiding. Then the comms officer's head came up and after a few button pushes.

"Sir! We are receiving a message in High Tholian!"

The tone and volume was almost enough to crack Till's outer skin. When nothing more was said for a few seconds, Till started giving commands. "What does it say… let me hear it!" One part of him thought that it was odd that he was having to be so explicit in his commands, to the normally reliable officer.

Before the last word had left his mouth. A series of clicks and chirps fill the command center. It was not long before it was understandable to the staff. "You are a long way from the Collective, are you on a training mission?"

Till looked around the bridge, and he could see the looks, but he had a hundred questions. Only he could not sound them out, on the bridge. He had been hanging onto command by his claw tips. The Lattice was alive with hints that his people were getting tired. After traveling so long and far using the wormhole generator, traveling at only fifty times the speed of light seemed slow. He had to move that thought to the back of his mind. Why did this ship know to use Tholian to communicate with them? And what was this Collective that the aliens thought they might belong to?

"Have a communication line patched into my day cabin. I want to talk to this alien from there." That was the only thing he could think of. Well it was that or blow them out of space.

Till turned from the bridge and exited the command center to a side room. It took a few hours, but Till was able to find out a few things about the local area. He quickly worked out that this Orion was a merchant race. This type of race was not unknown to Till. He had even been accused by some of his fellow officers to be part alien, before the slave overseers had rebelled. That was not a good thing, and Till had killed three of those officers with his own claws. Being compared to a lower race was not…civil, even in jest.

After finding out that he was dealing with a merchant, things went quicker. He found out some information about the major or gross dealings in this local area. The Orion agreed to "lead' his ship to the Tholian Hold Fast. He would not take them. It was too far out of his way, and he had to generate a profit for his leader. He would trade them a safe route to the rest of the Tholians. It would cost 10tons of what he had called Tholian silk. It had taken some more data transferred for Till to understand what he wanted by that name. What he wanted with 10 shipping units of old Tholian night bedding for was none of his business. It was a risk, but it was not an expensive risk. According to the navigation data, they were only eight months away, at their current speed.

Till watched the alien space craft go to warp and leave this system. They would need to stay here for another week. That would give them enough time to restock some of what they needed to sustain life and help maintain their ships. It would not fill all their needs, but it would keep them alive. When the harvesters were recovered from the planet. All they would need to do was followed the marked path they had been given by the aliens. What could go wrong, by just following an imaginary line in space? Till felt a chill run down his spine, and between all six of his legs. He knew that he had just tempted fate.

Captain YIntaHvIS Quv commanded a three ship scouting task force for the Klingon Navy. All of the ships in his command were old F5's frigates. All of the newer F5Ds fitted with drone launchers were being used in areas, which were thought to be more at risk. His ships were so old, that they spent more time in the repair docks than they did on patrol. There was no honor in his ships or on missions, that had them looking for threats in areas of space that had not seen any threats in generations. The nearest threat were the Tholians. And three old and little F5s did not need to be messing with them. Not after the Federation and two other smaller powers had come to their aid to defeat the full might of the fleet. The great fleets had almost crushed the interlopers, but now the lines had been pushed back to where they had been before the war.

The Klingons had been tracking a set of ghost, and now those ghost were almost known. Sort of. There were four ships out there. Two of the ships looked to be warships, but the battle comp had no idea what they might be. The other two ships had the smell of merchants.

Captain Quy did not care that Battle Comp could not identify any of the ships he was looking at. They were ships and warships in Klingon space. That could not be allowed to continue. With glee and a splash of blood wine, he order this ships to attack.

Two Tholian Destroyers were escorting one freighter and one support ship. Three of the four ships had been with Till from the start of the great trek. One of the two heavy survey cruisers had found something of interest to the rest of the fleet. It was a rogue planet, which had been found to have a nice deposit of warp crystals. Those crystals were needed for efficient faster than light travels. It was not large enough of a deposit for the whole fleet to come to a stop, or to divert the whole fleet to intercept the rogue planet. The two support ships were the fastest non-warships in the fleet under Till's command. They had recovered enough crystals to fill the small freighter and the limited space on the recovery ship turned miner support ship. Now they had to get back to the fleet with this load of valuable materiel. They were over halfway to the rest of the fleet when the three round nose and bat winged alien ships attacked them.

Till had his whole fleet on alert. The attack on the convoy had been a surprise. The firepower of those little ships had been impressive. The energy weapons had firepower, range, and energy efficiency better than anything but his T-phasers. He had pulled in all of his picket ships into one large battle fleet, as soon as he had found out about the attack.

His two survey cruisers and the labs on the starbase were showing him the growing fleet of these ships that the Orion information had labeled Klingons. So far they had not interfered with his slow movements around what he had thought was the outer edge of so called Klingon space. He had no idea how long that might last, but every hour of delay meant that his ships were that much closer to space under control of the local Tholians.

Till reviewed the data from the convoy escorts. The web casters had been the only thing that had saved the ships from the surprise attack. The powerful and strange energy weapons had mostly been stopped by the webs cast by the two escorts, but it had bought time. The two destroyers were able to protect the two cargo ships and removed two enemy light ships from battle. The third enemy warship was able to flee, but it was visibly damaged and no doubt screaming for help. The four-ship convoy had been screaming for the same, but they had help that was closer at hand than the Klingons apparently had.

Till had detected the first enemy ship one duty shift after the convoy had returned to the fold. More enemy ships were detected by the returning ships under his command. He had no idea what capability these larger ships had. His command center could only put notes about the different size ships on the plotting screen. As soon as his science labs could pull new data, the screen was updated. This new data would be handed off to the modified starbase and every warship in the fleet soon after. Till kept his fleet moving at their best long term speed, and that was the speed of the slowest vessel. The Lattice was filled with wonder if there was going to be another fight.

Till had been sleeping in his saddle for the last three days. He would study the displays every time his mind pulled him awake. Each time he had seen enemy warships grow in number. Sometimes it would only be by one ship. Other times it would be three. Now there were 30 warships shadowing his fleet on three sides that he knew of. Only one of the ships was as large as one of his two battleships. The computers said it was a command ship, so it should not be as powerful as the one Tholian battleship that it had equal mass to. Then the screen started to rapidly change.

The Klingon fleet shattered like glass. No one was firing at them, but the massive fleet was scattering in all directions. Till thought it might be some kind of maneuver, meant to distract him before the attack. Then his thoughts changed. Behind the scattering fleet of small Klingon ships, was a second fleet. It was made up of mostly larger but fewer ships. Where Till had been able to see that the Klingon ships were all Klingon, by common ship design philosophe.

The new second fleet did not match in anyone design philosophe. Some of the ships were saucer and cylinder combinations. It also had boxcar and bar combinations and a shape that Till had no problem recognizing. What he did not understand was why you would weld two PF hulls together, but they had. It was a relief that a hailing signal came from the odd looking Tholian ships. The meeting between the two branches of the Tholians was not as easily done, as it had been hoped for by both groups. That should have been expected when both groups found out how much time drift had happened.

The Holdfast had learned a few things with the return of the 312th battle group. That kind of helped with this new group, but not all the way. Where the battle group was tired, and their ships on their last legs after so long traveling. Due to the time effect on the mode of travel this group had been using, they had different issues. This group's ships were still in need of some maintenance, but the ships did not have one foot in the ship-breaking yard. Now food was another issue for the crew. They had boarder line mineral deficiency, because they had skipped so many worlds to pull supplies from. Also the war in their home galaxy was still very fresh in their minds.

The escorting Tholian destroyer to the Neo-Tholian fleet help for the first few days with the food issues. It was just long enough for an Orion owned blockade runner to make a high-speed run filled with supplies to reach them. Till was wondering why it was not a Tholian made and crewed freighter sent out to supply them. It was something that he brought up to the Tholian commander of the escort. He had deflected on the answer, but the Lattice was humming.

Till had been confused to find out that these were helper races, but not slave races to the Holdfast. He did not mind that. He felt that the way, that his people had treated the other races had caused their down fall. After a few days he found the term and definition of the word Allies, in the massive amount of data he had been sent. That made the "command" not to contact any member of "The Federation" hard to understand.

It would take three months for the slow-moving convoy to make it to the Hold Fast. The escorting fleet of local races was not static in this convoy. It would shrink and grow as ships had to leave to perform other missions or need to resupply. Till used that time to study the locals and data mine the information he could from the Tholian ships, and the lattice of the nearby new Tholian ships. He was an Admiral and the Tholian High Command did not put just anyone up for that title. He made sure that each ship under his command had a plot that showed the fleet's current location, and how long it would take to reach the Hold Fast. When the fleet had dropped out of warp for the last time and arrived at the little Dyson sphere, the whole fleet let out a collective breath. Their long journey was over, and not only had they made it, but they had helped others to make it to this new home.


	6. Chapter 6 Home Coming ?

I do not own this intellectual property, but it was eating me not to write it. I did not have a beta reader or a tech reviewer on this project. I also have not played the game for about 15 years.

**Chapter 6: Home Coming?**

Till was sitting in a house, and it was a real Tholian house. It was something that he never thought that he would do again. The Tholian Holdfast was a small Dyson sphere, but even one of those can hold a lot of people, and Tholians liked a population density that would drive most other races crazy. Every person in his little fleet had been given a place, a normal place, to live after a few hours of processing. Most of that had been medical, but not all of it. Tholians tended to breed for a certain job. If that job was not available, it caused an individual to become distressed. It would take some time for everyone he brought to this galaxy to settle in.

The Leadership Council that had been set up had finally taken a break. Till had been grilled by both the non-military types and what everyone, outside of the Tholians, was known as the Neo-Tholian's military commander. The other Hight Admiral was the local military leader, and Till was not going to try for the job. He was tired and wanted a break from command. He had commanded without break for long enough, that he wanted to take a few months away from that level of stress. The images of what had happened to his people were still very fresh in his mind. Now it looked like he was about to be thrown into another major war. Want they were calling "The General War" was taking its last gasps, but something was moving on the edge that the Tholians had noticed.

Till already had a few points of friction, with this group. He could not understand why they were trying to avoid contact with the local races. He wanted to trade with them. He had to keep from snapping a civilian's legs off, when they did not seem to get the hint that the "old" enemy was coming. And that they were going to outnumber the Tholians when they got here.

He had been thanked and "rewarded" for his quick thinking on bringing the damaged enemy light cruiser class ship along with the rest of his fleet. The updated shield cracker and web breaker technologies would be very helpful to the rest of the Hold Fast threw any new war. The Battle Group had fought many battles with the Enemy on the way to this place, but they had not been able to capture a single enemy ship. Till had pointed out about each enemy ship having a suicide command, when he was told of this story. The few scientists that he had carried, had also been a help to a number of different projects. But the local Holdfast had taken years to hatch whole groups of that caste, after they had landed. The new blood would soon start to improve the larger group of scientists with their old and very well understood knowledge.

The tactical wormhole generator might prove to be useful, if they could work out the time delay that was a side effect. This local branch of the Tholian race had an obsession with time travel and other dimensions as a rule. Till was thinking that they were borderline in hysterics about the subject. When he asked what was to become of his fleet? He had been both disappointed and shocked at the information. While his little fleet had been on the way to the Holdfast, after being found. This subject had been decided, without input from Till. After all of the individuals had been checked out, and given some down time. They were to start recycling the ships and whatever cargos they might still be carrying in their hulls.

Another item that was pointed out, was that the additions of the four support and yardships along with the bays in the starbase would almost add a quarter to the yard space that the Hold Fast had. The Holdfast could build only small ships in the yards they had. The Battle Squadron was helping their knowledge base in building or modifying those support yards for large ship construction.

Between them, their crews, and the staff that the battle group had carried in some of those cargo ships. They would quickly have a marked impact on the rest of the local defense force. When it was reported he had recovered two command modules for capital ships? The Navy commander had almost vibrated out of his shell. It would seem that the major stumbling block on expanding their fleet with major warships, was making new command modules. Till had no idea what would become of those two hull parts. If he had known that they were going to be in such high demand? He would have ordered the yard and support ships to make more on the trip, while they were traveling. It was not like those crews had been overloaded with work on most of the trip.

Till had not heard recycling when they were talking about his command. He had heard the word scrapping. The locals had enough small warships under their command. They could even make more of them, at a fast rate. It made more sense, to them, to reduce the new ships to spare parts. They were going to start with the venerable little destroyer escort. She had been just launched back into space after being repaired in the starbase. She had made the last month of space travel on her own power. It would be followed by the remaining Patrol craft sized vessels, that had made it on the long trip. That did not seem right to him, but the Holdfast and the Military commander had agreed to this plan. He did not have to like this plan, but he had to follow it. That is unless he wanted to try to take over as the commander for all of the Holdfast defense units.

While the smaller craft were being dismantled every ship that was a cruiser or larger was going to go into a repair and refit cycle. The Destroyers would be held back and kept as they were, until they decided if it was worth keeping them. Thanks to the experience of working on the battle squadron's ships, most of the hard work was done on the planning side. All of the Particle cannons would be replaced with powerful local tech made disruptors. Those weapons would fit in those existing housings with very little in the way of modifications needing to be done. The Plasma weapons would be replaced with what was called photon torpedoes. It was hoped that shield breaker technology would be added later on.

He had just gotten used to the idea that anything smaller than a capital ship, will be removed from the active battle line. Then he was told that along with the smaller warships 3/4ths of the civilian ships would also be taken apart, as the yard space opened for them to be cut apart. When Till has asked why? He was told two things. One was that The Holdfast does not trade with outsiders. And the other was that the Tugs would not be scrapped. It would seem that the locals had an idea about using tugs as a type of warship. Now that the Tholian Navy had a few Tugs to work with. They would be doing the same, as the local races. Till had no idea about armored Tugs, but he was willing to spend the time looking at them. Then he dropped his own bombshell on the council. He was tired of inferring about the coming threat.

"Why are you making the same mistakes, which caused the fall? The Seltorians are coming, and they will outnumber us. They might need a long supply chain, but they will have a whole galaxy to support them. You know the one we used to call home. We need all the help we can get, if we do not want to be wiped out."

This statement had caused a shimmer in the Lattice so great, that the meeting had to be wrapped up before any more major issues were worked out. After that Till had more or less been sidelined as the power players of the Holdfast Collective try to deal with the waves, that the new fleet and Till had caused to the Holdfast and the rest of the local area. What most of the larger powers considered a regional power, just had their fleet grown by 3 capital ships and another dozen major warships. The Orion's had made lots of money with the selling of this information to the rest of the quadrant in a very short amount of time. Every ambassador to the Holdfast and some groups that did not have ambassadors were sending questions to the council any way that they could. This was affecting the harmony of the Holdfast and they only could come up with one way to balance it. It was one they did not like, but by now the council had grown use to the human word compromise.

Till is given command of a sector of space, that was not far from the Holdfast, but it was closer to the Federation. He would be in command of any interaction, on a tactical level, with any aliens that he felt could help in his mission. It was hoped that his presence and attitude would better help the Holdfast there. Any Tholian, and there were many that were having problems settling in with the rest of the Holdfast, could ask to be sent to that location.

Manager Fallal"ki would be taking over some section of the Dyson sphere, and would not be joining Till. This seemed to make the manager very happy, and it might give him a path for a position of power on the council. He was of the mental type that like the old ways, that the Holdfast was clinging to. This was going to be a test case, now that the Tholians had a set of plans on how to build, arm, and armor a fleet base. They might start to push out an outer layer of defense outposts, mainly focused at the Klingons.

It was two months later and Till could not help but hum aloud. He was sitting on the command center of his great warship. The council could not find a way to take it from him, so he still walked its corridors. They had just arrived at his new home, and soon to be command. This star system did not hold any M class planets or planets that Tholians could live on without needing a lot of hard to find life support equipment. Tholians had no problem doing that for a long length of time, but it was not healthy for them.

That did not mean that it was a useless system. It had 4 stars that orbited very close together, and that had left a massive amount of rubble to mine. Many important ores had been found over the years, but the Holdfast did not have the right equipment or personnel that could do the job. Plus, the Holdfast would need to keep a large enough number of warships there just to keep any other groups from taking it away from them. That is until now.

The Modified Starbase would be the core defense, besides Till's own dreadnought. He also had two light cruisers, six destroyers and any smaller warships that would be based out of that area in the future. He also would have one of the yardships and three of the remaining freighters, which he had brought with him. The Starbase and Yardship would act as a nodal system of support for the whole Tholian Fleet. Now with two threats from outside of this galaxy being accepted to be real threats to the rest of the Tholians. This was deemed a good use of their limited resources.

The secondary goal for this mission, was making new command modules for Capital ships. They might be able to make three to maybe four of those completed devices a year. It would depend on what was found in this system, and how much time the two repair areas were used to support the Holdfast on other missions. Till had been given a blank slate on how he was going to use this area, besides those two goals. Till intended to do whatever it might take to protect all Tholians.

First thing after the starbase had been positioned, and the local group of stars was scouted heavily by his little fleet. They would start detaching the two super tugs from the old fleet base. They would be staying under Till's command, thanks to the oversight of the council. They just knew that the Starbase could self-deploy. They had not looked at how, it had become that way. While the yardship would first help with this task, and then it worked on repairing the first of the freed tugs. The two tugs would then move large rocks closer to the fleet base. Those would start to be both mined for anything useful, and they would be used as anchor points for defensive webs. After the base was set up with an adequate defenses. The real work would start.

Till knew that the supply of warp crystals he had handed over to the council, would be used up in less than two years. He wanted to find more, and they should be here. How much? Now that was anyone's guess, but he also might be able to trade for them. It took only a few months before the first free trader found Till and his growing operations. The energy use was something that could not be easily hidden, and Till had not even tried. Now that Till knew more about Tholian Silk and why it was wanted so badly. He had made an effort to collect it from his people, and not let the council know about it. Between some of the excess ores and the silk. The trader had left the area very happy.

It would not take long until more and more ships were stopping by this part of space. Traffic was so heavy, that one of the outlying rocks that was being mined had an M class habitat fitted into a larger section of her tunnels. It would become the center of trade for this area of space, and it was another reason that the Klingons were upset. This influx of capital, weapons and other benefits helped Till complete his secondary rolls. He was shipping back to the Holdfast new Phasers, Disruptors, photon launchers by the ship load and drone technology was starting to flow to the Holdfast. When the first two new command modules were delivered. He was regaled with praising clicks. His little trading area also became a center of spying by the other powers in this part of space. The humans could not understand Tholian speech patterns, but they called the area New West Berlin. Even with all of these spies. They never realized how this area was supporting the whole Holdfast military space fleet. They could only see Webs and a few rocks being cut up.

Till was reviewing the latest threat. Reports were starting to come in of missing ships. A whole fleet of ISC warships had gone missing a few days ago. He was trying to keep his feelings from making it into the local Lattice, but he did not think he was succeeding. His contemplation was interrupted by the comms station.

"Sir! A message from the Holdfast! It's a general alert. "The Great War has started. Be prepared for an attack by both old and new enemies."

Till looked over to his command staff. "We know that the high council had foreseen this, and we have been preparing for it. We knew that the beasts from Andromeda would keep going, even after the ISC came forward. I want all ships on alert and all weapons powered and shields ready to come up, at the first sign of trouble. I want the Y188 to be known as the year the Tholian fleet regained its honor." Till stopped talking and looked over and up to three different tri screens. "I think it's time to turn A78 around. Let's show others that we have a small auto repair yard open, if they have the parts. Make sure Spackle is tied into the defensive net of the Fleet Base."

Till had to keep his inner voice quiet. They had been working on the wormhole generator that he had brought along, but it had not been turned into anything useful to fight with. There were just too many bugs in devices like that. One was the odd way that it made Tholians want to cleave when they were within a few thousand KMs of the device for any long length of time. The other major bug turned out to be a bit more helpful, than increasing the Tholian population.

The device had let them "see" into different dimensions. One thing that seemed to be a constant was that the group from Andromeda, would launch a massive war in this galaxy. It had taken only a few more "looks" to get the Holdfast moving in a way that would prepare them for another major war. It was not all smooth sailing as the humans would say, but they got more focused on that threat and not the Klingons or other local races.

Tholians loved to use asteroids to build in. While most outside races had just thought A78 was just another rock, which had been mined out and used as an anchor point for a massive expanse of Tholian energy webs. Now they would see what had been facing away from them and hidden from view behind the walls made of Tholian Webs. Over the next few hours. The rock known as A78 was slowly spun around, and a great circular maul that was an auto shipyard big enough to hold a Federation heavy cruiser with a little room to spare could be seen by the outside universe.

Thanks to a now rapidly growing population. The Tholians were able to start to help the Grand Alliance to hunt down the marauders from Andromeda. No one, but the Holdfast would know how many lives this preparation would save. The Holdfast could not be everywhere, but they would lend their firepower and modified shield crackers in the attacks. Till small repair yard would soon be filled with ships. Support ships from all of the races, to include the Klingons would be in orbit nearby. There would be raids into this system launched to take out this support node, but they would fail. Till had used all of his combat experience to turn this part of space into a massive death trap for any attackers. When the war was over, it still would be a Tholian support base. And it would be were the first warnings of the Seltorians would be heard.

The End….For Now.

Notes:

**Why did the TWG not work after the fleet arrived in the Milky Way?** The TWG needed a few hundred tons of Left handed crystal lattices Dilithium crystals to work as designed. Due the orbit of the Milky Way around the super massive black hole. All of the Dilithium crystals have a right handed crystal lattices. They still work for warp drives but nothing more advanced. When the TWG crossed the energy barrier? It shorted out the device.


End file.
